wrike social: project managing through a social network

Some time ago, I did a round-up of Cloud-based project management software.Projects have been a big part of my life, so I knew what I was looking for.

Application value changes over time. Better, worse, cheaper or more expensive.One now stands out. Wrike. So I’d like to update my review.

Wrike brings social networks to project management – let’s see how it works…

Bring people together through a social network

We’ve seen the power of social networks. What started out as a leisure time activity evolved into a vehicle for change. And as projects are all about change, Then why not build a project network?

Wrike seems familiar from the word go. So that’s the first major hurdle jumped. Looking at Wrike’s interface, its a real “Why didn’t I think of that?” moment.

Project management is to do with tasks, but people are performing those tasks, shouldn’t we be managing people first?

Wrike shows people’s roles like a profile update, you see each status at a glance.

Universal information management – accessible in one place

Wrike’s advanced social network features haven’t dumbed down the package – far from it. All the usual PM tools, Gannt charts and full time management, reports, etc., are available. You also have really powerful features like integrated two-way mail. Even micro-blogging, allowing discussion and resolution of tricky situations.

This gives the PM and the team the opportunity to understand issues without recourse to a lengthy, time wasting and disruptive meeting.

Dashboards and Activity Streams

Wrike breaks down complexity into manageable modules. Dashboards provide overviews. This is fully interactive and aggregates all vital headline data into one main control area. Key and individual activity streams monitor workstreams or “towers”.

This top-down, drill-down view gives a PM full control over a wide range of sub-activities, removing the dreaded “Don’t know, have to ask” scenario that destroys PM reputations!

Wrike Social – bringing it all together

There’s a lot more to see with this application that a simple overview like this can’t show. Go take a look for yourself and get ready to be pleasantly surprised.

Wrike costs start at $19 a month for the manager, then $9 a month for every collaborator sharing the plan. There’s a free trial to start, too.

There are optional extras like Outlook and iCal synchronisation, but the site covers all that.

Wrike Social – how good?

For any Cloud application, always look at its users. With SalesForce and eBay onboard, you don’t get a better recommendation than that!

4 thoughts on “wrike social: project managing through a social network”

Wrike surely is a great tool! Thanks to its social side, it was very easy to adopt. And we are very thankful for the free mobile apps! We have both iPhone and Blackberry users, so that boosted our productivity a lot!
And Wrike seems to adding new features on a regular basis, which is great!

Who’s zen horizons?

zenscape was originally LANZen which provided strategy and system architecture to a number of global and UK clients from its inception in 2000 until the shift of market prompted the rebrand to zenscape to serve the rapidly expanding digital marketplace.